Oblivious routing and QoS guarantee in wireless mesh networks

Routing with QoS guarantee has been studied extensively for wireless mesh networks. While most of previous research assumes a static and known traffic demand, this assumption often does not hold in a real network. Oblivious routing has been proved an effective approach to tackle the routing and QoS problem when traffic demand uncertainty exists. In this paper, an oblivious-routing based QoS architecture, called a nonblocking network, is proposed to guarantee hard QoS in wireless mesh networks. In this architecture, as long as each edge node admits traffic no more than a specified amount, the network will never experience link congestion. The main difficulty in designing such a network is to find the optimal routing that can maximize the amount of traffic admissible to the network. We develop analytical models to find the optimal routing schemes for both unicast and multicast networks. For multicast networks, we show that if the network uses network coding, the optimal solution to the multicast routing network problem can be solved with linear programming. The analytical results indicate that our optimal QoS routing schemes perform much better than traditional shortest tree based multicast routing algorithm.